Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters

摘要

In the 1980s, commentators pronounced the vinyl record dead. After more than eight decades of continuous play, it appeared, the flat black musical disc had wound down. Hardly had the world's turntables stopped spinning, however, before there began murmurings of a vinyl resurgence. Beginning in the 1990s and then accelerating dramatically in the new century, discerning listeners turned from CDs and sound files to re-embrace the seemingly archaic technology of vinyl. In Vinyl Records and Analog Culture in the Digital Age: Pressing Matters, Paul E. Winters asks why it is that "despite the best efforts of the recording industry and its confederates in the electronics industry, the consumption and collection of vinyl records not only never went away," but also "continues to grow and to thrive in the new millennium" (p. xv). In pursuit of an answer, he ranges across a wide arc of sound recording history, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and draws on sources as varied as industry publications, record-collectors' periodicals, and his own ethnographic explorations of internet culture.